What the Ash Was Hiding

The fight at the field of the lost went on longer than the last records let it seem. When the notes take it up again, the two ships were still circling.

The other vessel was a medium explorer, a Nebular starhopper, and its crew were Free Captains: pirates, as Taeon wrote it, with an exclamation mark he did not often use. The scans filled in the rest a piece at a time. She was quick and nimble for her size. She was moderately armed and moderately armoured, a working ship rather than a warship. Four living crew aboard. At middling range the Sunrise Maiden put a hard blow into her forward shields, and the shields held.

Somewhere in the exchange a taunt went across the void, and it landed. The records don't say who said it or who it stung, only that it stung for a while. I have always found that detail strange. A ship's hull can take a cannon, and a crew can still be rattled by a voice on the channel.

Then the starhopper took a direct hit on her stern, deep enough that something inside her broke twice over, and she powered down. Her drives went quiet and her guns went cold. She gave up the way a cornered animal sometimes does, all at once, when fighting has stopped making sense to it.

Her captain showed herself. Taeon described her closely, as he described most living things he had not seen before. She was a garishly dressed woman, maybe a vesk; he wasn't sure, and he wrote that down too. She wore a red bandana and an eye patch, a long red-and-blue jacket open at the front over a fancy leather bodice, and knee-high boots. She had an ornate sword at her side and curly black hair gathered in a top-knot. She had the swagger of a pirate out of an old story, but quieter about it. Her name was Olara Okwana. Beside it the notes say Rusty Rivet and nothing more. Whether that is her ship, her crew or something else, the records don't tell us.

What she told them comes down to us in pieces. There was a hole, near something called a Star-eater spine. There were nasty bone ships after "them": Eox, and the Corpse Fleet. Then a name, K-9204, and a map, and one more word, Spikesmasher, set down with no explanation. The notes don't say who "them" were, or how the map passed from her hands to theirs. They only show where the party went next.

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K-9204 was a jagged rock, about a mile across and walled in by cliffs. The gravity was low and the air was thin. There were no communications and no ships. Taeon recorded both absences, one after the other, as if he wanted them noted before anything else. Nobody would hear them from here, and nobody else had come.

The ground they landed on was ashy dust with chunks of mineral and ore broken through it. To the west two paths split, one climbing left to a rise, the other running right over level ground. To the east were the cliffs. The low gravity made everyone light: a person could jump three times as high and as far as usual, and lift three times as much. The slopes were still hard going all the same, loose and steep underfoot. They climbed one towards a cave with a roof over its mouth.

Nothing in the records suggests anything grew there. He would have looked anyway.

Note the ground where nothing grows.
Do not call it empty. Empty is a word for the hurried.
Note the ash, and ask what burned.
Note the stone broken open, and ask what broke it.
Where life is absent, the visitors stand out.
Note what was carried in.
Note what was left behind, and whether it was left in haste.
A made thing in a barren place is a footprint.
Do not touch it before you have learned its shape.
The desert keeps everything. That is its only kindness.
So walk slowly. So look down.
What does not belong will tell you who was here.

— the Observances, from the Readings on Barren Places

We are taught this Reading on gravel yards, which novitiates resent. The point is that a place without life is not a place without information. If anything it hides less. I think Taeon understood that on K-9204 better than most of us do on our gravel.

The rock did not hide much. There was a probe droid. There was cold iron, a heavy load of it, worth perhaps a thousand credits, the kind of metal that has its uses against certain things. And there was a pendant, shaped like the unholy symbol of the Devourer.

The records set the pendant down plainly, between the iron and a line of dashes, and stop there. They don't say who carried it, how long it had lain in the ash, or whether the droid had anything to do with it. They don't connect it to the Star-eater spine, and I won't either, though I notice that I want to.

The Field Canon, in its later additions, keeps one line from that day, which is like it:

LOW GRAVITY — small bodies (later additions)
Jump three times as high and far; lift three times as much. Slopes remain difficult.
(Kopalo, from field notes; K-9204.)

— the Field Canon, on Terrain, later additions

The notes end below that, with the cave just ahead and the pendant found.